Progressive Politics

Sorry, I'm not going to give you private information.

I guess your experience is from the USA where democracy, labour laws, social systems and regulations are all pretty dysfunctional, and getting worse as half the voters keep supporting it going worse.

Consider a European social country where those are more functional, with reasonable work time, no mandatory overtime, public healthcare etc.

You are focusing on possible bad outcomes of being paid for something and ignoring the rest, such as motivation and earning money through where you are best at, so you can buy what you are not good at or not have time to produce yourself.

Working towards things that make money can also mean working towards things where there is a demand. It makes the economy more efficient when the offer tries to match the demand. That's the point of having some freedom in a market instead of believing some political bureau can estimate it all from their ideological elite point of view. The trade off is that it requires proper regulation to prevent negative outcomes on people, which also not easy.

Too bad you're not touching the mixed economy point because it's a pretty good illustration about my point of the usefulness of some degree of free market and capitalism, since it comes from a country that calls itself socialist.